Like this:

Perhaps I am alone in feeling that Obama’s speech in Tucson was an insult to the dead and wounded, and a cop-out on his duty the American people.

I believe Barack Obama owed us some truth. The violent rhetoric on the right–and some on the left– has been building because our presidents have not given us truth.

Reagan needed to tell us the truth that America was in relative economic decline… not because we had failed, but because we had succeeded in reviving Europe and Japan from the devastation of World War II. He needed to tell us the truth that we were too reliant on warfare and not reliant enough on getting our allies to defend themselves. Instead, he got us deep in debt while creating the illusion of prosperity. The losers– blue collar workers and farmers– were made to feel like human garbage. He revived the culture wars: from partially criminalizing abortion to the claiming that AIDS was God’s judgment on gays, the embers of modern-day right-wing radicalism were stoked into an open flame then.

Bush the Slightly Greater needed to tell us the truth that Reagan’s tax cuts had been reckless and that the culture wars were wrong. As an member of the ultra-wealthy, he needed to tell his fellow aristocrats that their selfishness was sapping America’s strength. As a traditional Republican, it was his duty to stand against the racial hatred that the Willie Horton ad represented. The hapless Bush reaped the consequences of the debt and anger that had been Reagan’s gift to the nation in a recession that ravaged New England and California and in violent explosions like those at Waco and Ruby Ridge. It was on Bush’s watch that the first mainstreamed demagogue since Father Coughlin, Rush Limbaugh, came into his own. From his success, demagogues multiplied.Read the rest of this entry »

Today would have been the eighty-second birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated by yet another alleged “lone nut”, James Earl Ray, in Memphis in 1968.

Great efforts have been made since his death to deemphasize the events of the last five years of his life, as if nothing happened between the March on Washington and his death except for a string of extramarital affairs upon which FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was eagerly snooping and which right-wing sources keep injecting into the public discourse on Dr. King. Why? Because in those five years he had expanded his focus on civil rights to encompass the rights of union workers and the question of whether America should have been at war in Vietnam.

Here is an example of the sort of thing that the powers that be don’t want you to know about Dr. King: His seminal sermon, delivered two months to the day before his assassination, on what he called “The Drum Major Instinct”. You can listen to it here (RealAudio) or at the link here, but if you don’t have audio, you can read it here, courtesy of the Black Web Portal. Read it and compare his words to those of the modern-day white megachurch preachers: For starters, can you imagine any of them referencing Freud and Adler with such obvious familiarity?